Internet Artifacts
I love this timeline of internet firsts. Best of all:
You may touch the artifacts
The websites on display work—even the ones that used Flash!
The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age | MIT Technology Review
For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
Related links
Canadian Typography Archives
Go spelunking down the archives to find some lovely graphic design artefacts.
Worse than LaserDiscs?
Kevin takes my eleven-year old remark literally and points out at least you can emulate LaserDiscs:
So LaserDiscs aren’t the worst things to archive, networks of servers running code that isn’t available or archivable are, and we are building a lot more of those these days, whether on the web or in apps.
The Flickr Foundation
A non-profit foundation dedicated to long-term digital preservation.
Imagine if we could place ourselves 100 years into the future and still have access to the billions of photos shared by millions of people on Flickr, one of the best documented, broadest photographic archives on the planet.
The Flickr Foundation represents our commitment to stewarding this digital, cultural treasure to ensure its existence for future generations.
Its first act is the renewal of the Flickr Commons.
Reflections as the Internet Archive turns 25
Brewster Kahle:
The World Wide Web at its best is a mechanism for people to share what they know, almost always for free, and to find one’s community no matter where you are in the world.
Related posts
Cerf rocks
Long-term thinking for digital storage.
Of Time and the Network and the Long Bet
Matt has accepted the challenge I threw down in my Webstock talk (which has now been transcribed).